{"id":6012,"date":"2008-12-27T12:33:50","date_gmt":"2008-12-27T19:53:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=6012"},"modified":"2008-12-27T12:33:50","modified_gmt":"2008-12-27T19:53:38","slug":"ballgame-on-children-do-better-with-parents-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=6012","title":{"rendered":"Ballgame on "Children do better with parents together""},"content":{"rendered":"

Ballgame <\/a>has a good point:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The notion that \u201cChildren GENERALLY do better with parents together\u201d could be taken to mean that, out of the 100 families described above, children from the 80 non-divorcing families end up being mentally and emotionally healthier (as a group) than the children from the 20 divorcing families. That is very easy to believe. Indeed, there are any number of studies that show this, and these are the studies that are typically trotted out to misleadingly imply that divorce hurts children. In fact it\u2019s just another rather banal observation that children from happy families do better than children from emotionally fraught ones, and hardly worth the price of a billboard. It\u2019s almost like saying, \u201cPeople with money are less likely to have difficulties making ends meet.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the other meaning of \u201cChildren GENERALLY do better with parents together\u201d is quite different: namely, that the children in the 20 divorcing families would have been better off if those parents hadn\u2019t gotten divorced. THAT notion is purely speculative<\/em> as far as I know. I don\u2019t know of any study that demonstrates this \u2026 indeed, I don\u2019t know how any study could <\/em>demonstrate it. There would be insurmountable practical and ethical issues: you\u2019d have to do some kind of double blind study where couples considering divorce who have children would be permitted to divorce or compelled to stay together at random. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d also add that what “parents” means needs to be defined. If a child is being raised by a same-sex couple, would the people who put up the billboard say “great! The parents are still together!” or would they scowl and grumble that same-sex parents aren’t real parents? What about adoption? Etc, etc.<\/p>\n

This is also the start of an experiment with a new moderation style<\/a> for “Feminist Critics”: each post will now have two separate threads, one of which will be deemed “no hostility” and moderated appropriately, in the hope that more feminists will be willing to participate in discussions where we’re not attacked. (The change is due to Daran stepping down as moderator, because he’s enjoying his new relationship too much<\/a> to waste time blogging.)<\/p>\n

I don’t know if the new moderation style will work out — after all, the previous moderation style had the same good intentions, but wasn’t successful at retaining feminist comment-writers — but I hope it will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ballgame has a good point: The notion that \u201cChildren GENERALLY do better with parents together\u201d could be taken to mean that, out of the 100 families described above, children from the 80 non-divorcing families end up being mentally and emotionally … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-families-structures-divorce-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}